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This chapter focuses on how Cicero constructs specific human beings and human ‘types’, to which individuals are assigned. It first discusses the factors that underwrote the constitution and reproduction of Rome's ruling elite, with particular emphasis on how Cicero combated what he stigmatizes as the ‘class racism’ of the nobility. Further sections consider how the category ‘nature’ was used in late republican rhetorical thought, as foil for an exploration of how Cicero deployed the lexemes natura and homo to construe persons as, first and foremost, human beings, quite irrespective of their historical identities. The chapter further illustrates Cicero's penchant for thinking in anthropological categories, and his reasons for doing so.

This chapter focuses on the sixteenth-century reception of Alcibiades’s seduction speech in the Symposium. Erasmus is aware of the issue of homoerotics, particularly in The Handbook of the Christian Soldier and in the Adages, as he evokes homoeroticism to discount it. Erasmus’s attempts to establish hermeneutic closure in his version of the Silenic image, and expunge Socratic eros. His religious approach contrasts sharply with François Rabelais’s famous Silenus Box in the prologue to Gargantua, for which Erasmus’s adage is assumed to have served as textual model. Rabelais mocks Erasmus’s straightened-out version of the image through comic means, suggesting that the reading out of Socratic sexuality should itself be mocked as an anti-historical hermeneutic approach. In this sense, the French writer directly distinguishes himself from other Renaissance translations of Plato, including Ficino whom he knew directly, and may be commenting on through the medium of fiction.

This chapter begins the argument that the Stoics’ thesis that virtuous activity is sufficient for happiness stems not from their belief that virtuous activity is the only good, but from the conjunction of that belief and their conception of virtuous activity as the exercise of choice in circumstances from which the self is always distinct. This chapter examines Epictetus’ articulation of that conception of activity. Following a close reading of Epictetus, Discourses I.1., the chapter argues that Epictetus’ conception of virtuous activity is an orthodox Stoic view.

This chapter discusses the effects and operation of indicators that are used to guide and measure the work of humanitarian relief agencies in their on-the-ground operations in Haiti. It examines two major sets of standards that were used as a form of self-regulation by several groups of major international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — such as the Sphere indicators — that are used by primary donors to guide certain decisions. This chapter also introduces the Sphere Handbook, which contains some regulatory silences.

This introductory chapter first sets out the purpose of this handbook, which is to explain how and why music may evoke emotion in a listener. The aim is to provide a volume that, in true handbook fashion, provides useful practical information that can guide researchers, for instance regarding the measurement of emotions. More generally, the handbook provides a representative coverage of approaches that may be said to define the field of music and emotion, in all its breadth and depth. An overview of the eight sections of the book is presented.

Chapter 5 examines the relationships between the authorities of governance, in particular, the governance system through which regional safety camera partnerships has been established across the UK, under the management of a national programme board, operated by the Department for Transport. In place of the messiness of Chapters 3 and 4, this example appears to provide an encompassing governance structure. However, on close engagement with the partnerships and those responsible for managing the programme board, it turns out that this governance structure does not straightforwardly pre-exist actions of governance. Despite a notionally standardized set of national guidelines, decisions are made and changed, and varied between partnerships. Structures and rules of governance are themselves subject to messy, ongoing ontological constitution.

Our understanding of the role that oratory played in Roman society and politics and the criteria applied to measure an orator’s performance and career, is partly based on ‘positive’ material: contemporary opinions on good oratory, positive instructions in the rhetorical handbooks, portrayals of the ideal orator. This chapter demonstrates what a systematic examination of such negative views reveals about Roman oratorical practice and attitudes to oratory. The ‘bad orator’ emerges as a figure who can be criticised on both technical and moral grounds.

This chapter explores how oratorical audiences were portrayed in works that were specifically meant to function as a means of practical guidance to the study of rhetoric. According to Cicero, the ultimate power lay with the audience who would proclaim the orator’s success or failure by agreeing or rejecting his description of affairs. In these rhetorical texts, the audience is portrayed as holding this power by virtue of its prudentia, the attribute that elsewhere, Cicero reserves for the gubernator rei publicae. Moreover, emotion and reason are not necessarily in conflict. By a close analysis of rational means of persuasion, this essay will shed light on the way in which the process of persuasion was perceived in the late Republic: the function of rhetorical handbooks was to provide the speaker with proper, useful, ammunition to persuade a real, concrete, audience.

This chapter presents a detailed critique of Alain Badiou's philosophical writings on cinema. It focuses on the ‘False Movements of Cinema’ chapter of his Handbook of Inaesthetics, his essay Philosophy and Cinema and ‘Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’. The chapter considers the more immediate problems raised by these works and discusses a number of questions Badiou left unanswered.

Analyzing Franz Boas's critically new insights under the lens of philology, this chapter redefines Boasian linguistics as a globalizing mode of mutual enlightenment through the exchange of grammatical concepts between selves across borders of sound and sense—a process he calls “comparative calibrationism,” the asymptotic pursuit of the always-inaccessible yet ever-closer universal truth. It focuses on the Handbook of American Indian Languages, where Boas dismantled every plank in the language-focused platform on which inferences of evolutionary primitivism stand. Boas also went after the very applicability to American languages of the comparative method of historical linguistics, from which inferences of so-called linguistic families descended from single proto-languages emerged in the nineteenth century.

Gathering in groups, expressing their fears, frustrations, and hopes, 113 incarcerated women at the largest women's prison in the United States described their need for adequate health care inside prison walls. Twenty focus groups met at Central California Women's Facility over a ten-month period in 2001 and 2002. The author of this chapter helped organize the groups so that incarcerated women could define ways to reduce their health and medical vulnerabilities inside the prison. The women's comments resulted in the compilation and publication of a handbook, Simple Answers to Difficult Healthcare Questions—Choice. The focus group discussions followed a predetermined set of questions in four areas: knowledge/information, experience/process, barriers, and outcomes.

This chapter traces the polemics about poetry and fashion that raged throughout the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century and profoundly shaped the literary field. It foregrounds one novel, fashionable genre: the internally conflicted vernacular poetic handbook. The vitriol on display there is unmistakable, almost amusing to an audience removed from context three centuries hence, but those directly stung by the barbs must have found it somewhat harder to laugh. This chapter surveys some of the poisoned darts from the 1620s to the beginning of the next century, roughly from Opitz to Magnus Daniel Omeis (1646–1708), the last notable Präses (President) of Nuremberg's influential poetic society, and the Pegnesischer Blumenorden (Order of Flowers on the Pegnitz).

The basics of the employment relationship and the job security hierarchy are explained along with the major elements of contract law. Contracts may or may not include only the "four corners" of a contract letter, but such documents may also include faculty handbooks, memoranda of understanding, promises made during the interview process, past practices, and institutional culture. Prominent cases are examined as they pertain to the security of academic jobs.

Chapter 2 argues that American officials and their Scout Handbook significantly modified the original British program and its Scout Laws and Scout Oath. American leaders replaced British Scouting’s nineteenth century emphasis on self-made manhood and militarism with a modern character development system for adolescent boys that emphasized urban-industrial values such as scientific efficiency and cooperative loyalty to expert managers. American Boy Scout programming maintained some continuity with Victorian manhood’s productive work ethic, modesty, and self-discipline with its Laws on being thrifty and cheerful as well as its merit-based rank and badge tests and advancement program. Scout Laws on being courteous and helpful taught boy members to lead society through serving the community, while Laws on being clean and brave attempted to quarantine Boy Scouts from any demoralizing influences in a rapidly modernizing society.

This chapter discusses the forms of Hellenistic compilations. Among these were the many books of Chreiai or Sayings, which originally consisted of anecdotes or remarks attributed to a particular philosopher. The nature of the collections of chreiai in the Hellenistic age may be confirmed by examining a later work, the Apophthegmata of Plutarch, which is a form of the same kind of literature. Another form of compilation consists of a brief programmatic introduction followed by a series of illustrative historical examples. The earliest of these handbooks to survive is probably Book II of the Economics of pseudo-Aristotle, which consists for the most part of examples illustrative of a point in Aristotle's doctrine.